When cheese isn't cheese

We all want to enjoy food that tastes great. Ask any American what their favourite food is, chances are they’ll tell you something delicious… but not necessarily healthy.

Pizza, for example, is one of America’s favourite foods - according to some studies, Americans eat 3 billion pizzas a year. That’s 350 slices of pizza every second!

But can pizza be healthier? And if so, how?

Many pizza companies are certainly trying, but tinkering with the ingredients of an established favourite is a risky game, and not just because you jeopardise the flavour that many people already know and love. All foods and food ingredients follow strict regulations, but there are also certain foods that must follow standards of identity.

Standards of identity are essentially US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or US Department of Agriculture (USDA) recipes for a massive range of foods. These standards were created back in the 1930s as a way to assure people that the food they were buying really was what it said it was. Remember, this was a time decades before the rules for ingredient labelling and nutrition information that we know today.

So, back to pizza. As we all know, most pizza is topped with cheese — a food that needs to meet a standard of identity. Different types of cheese have different standards. In order to label your product as containing that type of cheese, you have to ensure that it meets the parameters established in its standard.

Pizza can be made healthier

Why does this complicate the issue of making a pizza healthier? Well, reducing salt and fat from pizza overall means reducing those elements from each ingredient of the pie. To reduce fat, you may look at the cheesy topping and decide to reduce the amount of fat in that part of the pizza. If that’s what you decide, you have to make sure you don’t go too far.

Fat is a natural part of milk and therefore of cheese. Removing too much fat from cheese means that the food no longer matches the standards of identity, which often require a minimum amount of milk-fat. Then, your cheese pizza would suddenly require a changed ingredient listing that says something along the lines of ‘low fat dairy product’ — doesn’t sound as tasty as cheese, does it?

If you’ve reduced all the fat you can from the cheese, then you’ve got to look elsewhere on the pizza to make nutritional improvements. Perhaps in a meaty topping, in the pizza sauce, or in the dough. Either way — there’s only so far you can go without compromising the food’s essential character.

As well-known brands such as DiGiorno, TombStone, Jack’s, and California Pizza Kitchen move towards removing artificial flavours and reducing sodium, there are many innovators behind the scenes figuring out the best ways to make reductions without infringing on standards or heavily affecting taste.